Odds are pretty high the intelligence community has resulted in more attacks on America than it has prevented.

Or, maybe you can explain to me why the country that has the largest intelligence community by an order of magnitude also has the largest terrorism problem on the continent?

Correlation without causation. The United States has a lot of "the largest" by an order of magnitude. The size of the intelligence community could be causal, but so could the country's national visibility or wealth consolidation.

We're also working with a messy definition of "terrorism." For all its problems, the US doesn't have a destabilized central government; I would imagine one could ask the leadership of countries undergoing active revolutions whether they consider the opposition "terrorists," and if they do, I'd say they have a bigger "terrorism" problem than the US.

I don't know, I don't think so, but I also think that, as much as I don't like police, we can work on their brutality, their behaviour, their racism, their biases, but without police forces the situation wouldn't be much better.

If the CIA has "gone rogue" what current publicly-known controls would be able to stop them from continued actions which are not in the best interest of the American public?

Congressional oversight is a mild annoyance to them at best, and the CIA has been caught lying to them before. No reason to trust they are working in our interests except "I believe the propaganda" and wishful thinking.

Maybe it will prevent some of those attacks that the intelligence community precipitated. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-attack-drones...

This is exactly how terrorists are created. Some poor farmer is going to care more about feeding his family than commit suicide missions. People who lost their whole family from an American drone attack however...

> . People who lost their whole family from an American drone attack however...

Will continue to care about more about feeding their family.

There is no connection between being victim and becoming a terrorist or we in Italy should be all terrorists, because in the 70s a lot of people have been killed by state terrorists.

Lookup Giorgiana Masi, for example, or Stefano Cucchi.

Their families didn't kill anybody.

They just asked for justice.

What's the pathway to justice for an Afghan family whose children were killed by a drone strike?

What's the pathaway to justice for a family to go to die for the cause, when their children gonna die anyway if they do?

Vengeance has never been a pathway to justice, kamikazes go to die because their families are compensated or because their families are threatened or because they are radicalized in other ways, there's no connection between bombings and suicide bombers, in fact you don't see fathers or mothers do it, you see young males do it (85% of all suicide bombers are man).

Radical organizations use bombers as weapons, they need them to be reliable (as reliable as possible) you can't just count on the momentary lapse of reason that could bring a father to hope to kill his son's killers.

Hamas, for example, was against using women as suicide bombers, but in 2004 they changed idea, after the first woman was used, they said “this is a significant evolution in our fight. The male fighters face many obstacles... Women are like the reserve army―when there is a necessity, we use them.” [1]

[1] https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pdffiles/PUB408.pdf [PDF]

If I commit a murder I will go to jail, even if I make a magical pill that instantly cures cancer and AIDS. The same sadly does not happen for the intelligence community. They can murder as many innocent people as they want without having to prove their usefulness.

If you made a magical pill that cured cancer and AIDS, and the medical establishment lost trillions of dollar, and were outspoken about trying to destroy you...

Then I would consider the possibility that they were framing you.

> The same sadly does not happen for the intelligence community

I confess I don't know, but I imagine that if you make some mistake while working for agencies like CIA or MI5 or KGB you simply disappear, you die if you're lucky, or something worse happens to you.

> They can murder as many innocent people as they want without having to prove their usefulness.

I seriously don't think it works like that...

There is no publicly available credible evidence that the intelligence community has any effectiveness preventing attacks.

Point of reference, TSA has a 90% failure rate on tests of their performance while consuming vast amounts of money and inconveniencing every traveler. Does the public have any good reason to believe the CIA is more effective than the TSA?

Is there any reason to believe the CIA does more good than harm?

No one has demonstrated net positive value from the intelligence community.

We have proof that every intelligence in the world is working to undermine our freedoms, so it's easy to speculate (with some degree of certainty) that if others have their own agencies you need to have yours, to counter theirs.

What are those "freedoms", where is that proof, and what is the motivation of these "intelligences"?

I assume they do it because they hate American freedom.

> are those "freedoms", where is that proof, and what is the motivation of these "intelligences"?

The freedom of the people to chose their own representatives and leaders, something U.S. agency CIA has tempered with many times, especially in South America.

> I assume they do it because they hate American freedom.

Or is the CIA that hates other countries freedom to not agree with them?

Maybe other countries created their agencies to defend them from CIA.

There are always two sides in a story.